Roadgames

It's precisely its pretensions which make this a surprisingly agreeable cross of angst-ridden '70s road movie with Hitchcockian thriller. In homage to Rear Window, the windshield of poetry-quoting truck driver Keach's lorry stands in as the blank sheet upon which he sketches fantasies about what he observes on the road. A string of grisly murders which follow him across Australia, and a lift given to hitchhiker Jamie Lee Curtis, who later disappears, fuel his already vivid imagination still further. Effective as a string of cinematic shocks, the movie manages a good number of coups, with its cargo of raw meat, use of Jamie Lee's association with endless knife-flicks, and the ever-so-slightly surreal placing of figures in a vast landscape, making for an endearing horror pic.